The dirty truth about British toilet taboos

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/dirty-truth-toilet-taboos-handwashing

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My school days are a blur. But two memories stand out. One was a sign on my primary school toilet cubicle door: "Now wash your hands." The sternness of the instruction still resonates, but I couldn't swear that I always followed it. The second was in high school, when I was sitting in what I thought was a private toilet stall and looked up to find half a dozen of my so-called friends leaning over from the next cubicle, laughing. I can swear to my emotions then, and I can still feel the echoes. Embarrassment, humiliation, anger, 35 years later.

There is nothing so queer nor powerful as humans' attitude to an essentially and unavoidable human activity: that of expelling unused matter out of our bodies, at least once a day, in one way or another. When technology created a toilet that didn't smell and could be put behind closed doors, our attitude got queerer still. Taboos thrive in silence. You'll say that hygiene is not taboo. All cultures have rules about hygiene. Deuteronomy 23 instructs Jews to excrete outside camp and to carry a spade to bury the result. A Hindu text suggests firing an arrow and only doing your business where it lands. Dirt is not godly, cleanliness is.

But the firmness of those religious instructions is an illusion. Toilet behaviour has always been about psychology as much as physiology. The news that money and credit cards are liberally covered with faecal bacteria didn't surprise me. We may luxuriate in the belief that we are a clean and hygienic society, in this era of Dettol and anti-bacterial everything. But that closed toilet door hides a lot of assumption and denial.

I was not surprised at our filthy brass because in 1964, Dr James A Cameron, a GP, surveyed the underpants of 940 men of Oxfordshire, and found them filthy, containing anything from "wasp-coloured stains" to "frank massive faeces." The good doctor expressed his dismay, but also bafflement that "a high proportion of the population are prepared to cry aloud about footling matters of uncleanliness such as a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their faeces-stained pants." We buy antibacterial gels, spray, soap, everything, but are content to use toilet paper as a cleansing mechanism for the dirtiest part of our bodies, although it makes as much as sense as rubbing your body with a towel and imagining it removes dirt as well as a shower. People who use water to cleanse think we are filthy. I've read of Indian mothers transplanted to Britain who are – rightly – horrified by the thoughtless practice of keeping toothbrushes next to toilets and flushing with the seat up.

That's about personal preference. If you want to brush your teeth with faeces-sprinkled toothpaste, do so. And those filthy fivers probably won't kill you, if you have a healthy immune system and aren't living in an outbreak. We subsist happily with several varieties of e-coli living in our gut. But the filthy fiver, says Dr Ron Cutler, who led the study, could be the spark that lights the fire of an epidemic. A Harvard University-led study found that Britons were the least assiduous at handwashing during the H1N1 outbreak out of the five nations studied (though that didn't affect the vaccine uptake). Also, says Cutler, antibiotic resistance is already rampant. He talks of going back to a pre-penicillin era if we're not careful.

Not careful means tolerating bad bugs – a gram of faeces can carry 1m bacteria and 10m viruses – on banknotes, phones, tube train rails, everywhere, because we are too lazy to cleanse properly. It means an increasingly elderly population left more vulnerable without antibiotics that work.. It means sophisticated surgical operations that rely on antibiotics – heart transplants, for one – being crippled. But being careful means a small thing, like using proper hygiene – handwashing with soap, not a quick rinse – before eating and after going to the toilet. But how to convince dirty Britons to wash their hands? Realise that toileting, such an apparently physical activity, is governed by psychology: researchers found that putting a sign in service stations that read "is the person next to you washing their hands?" raised handwashing rates more than anything else.

And while we're behind that toilet door, here is another dirty truth. Our inability to see clearly when it comes to defecation directly contributes to 1.2 million children dying every year, still, from something as stupid as diarrhoea, caused by the fact that 2.6 billion people still have no toilets or even a bucket, and so faecal pathogens travel happily from soiled ground onto fingers, into rice pots, into bellies. That a five-year-old can die from one day to the next from something as stupid as the squits because governments, funders, most people refuse to talk or think about it: that's disgusting.